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Why I Practice Classical Architecture and Traditional Urbanism
Léon Krier
I grew ugrew up in an environment which, despite two recent world wars, was unblemished by modernist architecture and planning. Until the mid-1960s, Luxembourg was a miracle of traditional architecture, a small capital city of 70,000 souls, embedded in manicured agricultural and horticultural landscapes and lofty beach forests. We lived on a tree-lined corniche, overlooking a deep valley and one of the most accomplished townscapes in Europe. My father’s tailoring workshop occupied the ground floor of the townhouse and for my primary education, I hopped across the street when hearing the school bells chime from our garden. I had most of my secondary education in the baroque abbey of Echternach, a small medieval town, which together with its four-towered Romanesque Basilica had in less than 10 years been beautifully reconstructed in a 100 percent artisan way after a near total destruction during the 1944 Rundstedt offensive. My mother’s piano playing filled the house and during holidays my parents took us four children to Switzerland, France and Italy to visit places of beauty. Neighboring Germany was avoided for obvious reasons and in front of the Jungfrau, the panorama of Florence or the lakefront of Lugano, we all experienced an aesthetic communion of awe and admiration. The family concord shattered with a bang when for once I had chosen a destination and taken my parents in the summer of 1963 to see Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. Though I didn’t realize it immediately, my life’s orientation became defined by that visit. Until then, I had, via my brother, become acquainted with modernism merely through books of Le Corbusier, Giedion and Gropius. The formidable promises expressed there, had swollen my sails. In a Sunday High Mass, our parish priest had spoken of Ronchamp as the “ship of concrete, which had given body to our religion of love and hope,” no less. Le Corbusier had become for me a second messiah and as a result, I imagined modernist architecture to be something superior to all the beautiful buildings I had seen and grown up with so far. I fantasized of white Cubist volumes adorning my favorite places and mile-long inhabited walls, ploughing across Luxembourg’s historic city center, bridging its valley and digging into its forested hillsides; radiant visions of an unearthly splendor. Before the ill-fated visit we camped in an uncle’s olive grove in the Provence, enjoying perfectly intact beaches, towns, landscapes. The timeless perfection of a nearby Cistercian monastery, the picturesque charm of the surrounding farms and hill towns, and not least our bloated expectations for the impending Marseille visit had indeed ill-prepared us for the tawdry reality of the Cité Radieuse. We were all speechless with shock, wondering at first whether we were at the right address. Nobody, including myself, could quite believe that this was what I had been eulogizing for years. Next thing, and for weeks and months, trying desperately to overcome my unavowable disappointment, I found myself for the first time in my life justifying to my parents something which I profoundly felt to be socially unacceptable and aesthetically inferior to all we had commonly admired so far. The relentless modernist devastation of Luxembourg, which started in full a few years later, not only alienated me from my cherished birthplace, but more radically from modernism, the intellectual homeland in which I had sought temporary refuge from a provincial upbringing. It was this double exile, which paradoxically opened my eyes, gave sense and direction to my life. The rape of my beloved childhood places became for me what genocide is for a persecuted people — a life-threatening menace. I took it totally personally and decided to fight back, not clearly knowing who the enemy was. My resources being very limited, I had to calculate from early on how to spend them. Unable to find a master, a school or a doctrine which could teach me how to stop the holocaust and learn my craft, I felt I had no choice but to learn from buildings, towns and landscapes which I and my family had experienced and loved. I decided to abandon university, not to have kids, not to engage in building, but rather to think, to draw and generally find out what was so wrong with contemporary architecture and urbanism and how to right it ... not because I felt I had a special gift in that direction, but because of an absurd realization that nobody else, not even those I most esteemed, seemed inclined to do what I imperatively felt had to be done. It soon dawned on me that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School which in its pessimistic and utopian forms so enchanted my generation, offered only consolatory delusions. It was not a cure but part of a near-all engulfing confusion. Instead the incredibly fast and beautiful traditional reconstruction of Luxembourg’s war-ravaged small towns, villages and farms, which I had witnessed as a child, became for me, on reflection, a model of civilized and generally-accepted modernity. Indeed the various brands of post-modernism, which the critical theory of the Frankfurt School continues to inspire, are but futile attempts to escape from the debilitating tenets of modernism itself. Their experimentalism condemns them to very short life spans, to technological and cultural irrelevance, to broad social rejection. Not only have they proved incapable of replacing the technological and artistic heritage of traditional urbanism and classical architecture, but the colossal human cost of these failed experiments seems to me mostly but sterile diversions from an inevitable return to common sense. Furthermore, how can the modernist and post-modernist errant ways be redeemed by a cult and culture of masterworks when the masters themselves lack technical mastery, artistic maturity and more profoundly, philosophy? To me the worst consequences of modernism lie not only in the worldwide degeneration of the general building activity through the loss of traditional building skills, but more tragically in the intellectual corruption of their forms of transmission and theoretical foundations. Modernism’s historicization of traditional architectures, i.e. the ideologically-motivated reduction of a timeless building technology to a mere collection of obsolete styles and crafts, has blinded several generations to the continuing modernity and irreplaceable value of classical architecture and traditional practices. That is why I am primarily not interested in the history of traditional architectures and urbanisms but in their technology, in their modern practice. The question of modernity can therefore no longer be one of period and style but one of persistent utility and quality. Practicing traditional architecture today is then not a refuge in past styles or history, but a return to mature and experienced forms of environment building and management.
THE RICHARD H. DRIEHAUS PRIZE FOR CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE The ideological monopoly has extended to architectural teaching, competitions, publishing, and above all, to public commissions. The creation of The Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture breaks this untenable sectarian deadlock and announces the long-awaited democratization of architecture, a sea-change in the official architectural culture of today.
THE POWER OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE The universal principles of traditional architecture — harmony, firmness, utility — are concordant with the fundamental goals of all significant human establishments. In all great cultures they have been the chosen means of wise polity and civilizing action. In the whirlwind of all things human, they have been the guarantors of social bond stability and peace, the visible realization of a common moral world.
ON CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE AND VERNACULAR BUILDING A monumental compilation of private cells does not make a monumental building but an empty monumental gesture. An endlessly stretching public hall without proportional height does not make it a monumental space. If factories look like cathedrals, housing blocks like royal palaces, and museums like factories, there is something fundamentally wrong about our values and way of life. Classical architecture in all cultures and continents is to vernacular building what poetry is to prose. The power and value of classicism is given substance through this contrast in scale, dimension and artistic elaboration. Too much of it is a false luxury and too little a false economy. The trained eye cannot only distinguish styles and periods but can pinpoint a work within a few years and miles of its moment and place of origin. Even the most adept pastiche will not escape intelligent scrutiny. Thus it is impossible not to express in some measure the spirit of one’s time, and that is precisely what the notion of Zeitgeist describes. Zeitgeist is as inescapable as body color, but it is no guarantee of any kind of quality. It can therefore be of no interest to the artist and craftsman for they naturally long to attain timeless quality, using the best materials and techniques, which are also those that best resist the tests of time, accident and changing tastes. Great architecture does not embody the spirit of our time but the spirit of all time, an element of eternity.
CLASSICISM: A STYLE? Classicism embraces all monumental architecture (of all continents) of traditional construction and conception, fulfilling the Vitruvian triad. The work of Henry Bacon and that of Hassan Fathy belongs in that classification, as do the Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace. The latter are neither anti-historical nor anti-classical or antitraditional structures. They merely represent new additions to the vast typological and formal repertoire of the vernacular-classical tradition. When however they are elevated to the level of paradigm, architecture is diminished.
THE PERFECTION OF THE ORDERS
CONSTRUCTION AND APPEARANCE Against the mere skin depth of most “post-modernist” buildings, true vernacular and Classical structures are wall-deep and room-deep. Authentic traditional construction and predominant use of natural materials are essential to ensure the integrity of structure, architectural elements and appearance. A slightly higher initial investment is repaid by a longer life, by less maintenance, better appearances and generally better building.
TIMELESS OR TIMEBOUND PRINCIPLES The classical triad of venustat-firmitas-utilitas has meaning in a long-term perspective only. There is no more short-term beauty than there is short-term wisdom. Even the most solid and practical structure has a futile destiny if it lacks beauty. Beauty and harmony, utility and commodity, solidity and permanence, are unconditionally interdependent and their links are severed in modernisms. This is the reason why timeless or traditional principles are in irreconcilable contradiction with timebound or modernist principles.
CLASSICISM IS ONLY HUMAN This is the true meaning of classicism. It is of course a belief, a belief proven by experience, and with it man has been able to create his best landscapes and cities, his grandest places and monuments. Without it he can but destroy them.
CLASSICISM AND THE IDEA OF PROGRESS There is little doubt that organic nature has, with the creation of humankind, reached its highest possible, its classical, form. As far as man’s biological evolution is concerned, progress is thus a matter of the past. The typological order which shapes the organic world will not suffer any change, for its slightest mutation will mean the instant end of mankind itself. In our unavoidably anthropocentric conception of time, the typological inventory of organic nature not only seems but is complete. It does not know innovation, but only tireless duplication and reproduction; a reconstruction according to a fixed typological inventory of men, animals, plants, and so on. Typological experiments, genetic idiosyncracies and crossbreeds cannot reproduce. The principle of life means growth until maturity, reproduction according to type and species stability. Classicism assumes the same to be true for artistic creation. Innovation in form will occur only with the introduction of a new functional type. This being an extremely rare occurrence, it cannot be of any relevance for day-to-day artistic practice. To elevate it to a principle of life as modernism has done can only lead to delusions and categorical confusion. THE PHILOSOPHIC FALLACY OF MODERNISM Standardization, prefabrication, the free plan, the curtain wall, strip window and roof terrace, rolled steel, plate glass and reinforced concrete are useful for limited purposes. When raised to the level of exclusive dogmas they lead to the loss of typological order and building hierarchy, to uniformity and arbitrariness.
STRUGGLE TO DEATH? CLASSICISM VERSUS MODERNISM The question can therefore no longer be tradition versus modernism but democratic competition, a high level of education and professional practice in all disciplines and nonpartisan criticism. The real struggle to death ought solely to be between good and bad design. ------------------- Link for bestilling av boken: http://www.nd.edu/~arch/publications/driehaus_prize_book.htm
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